There was no response.
“Baltrice? Baltrice!”
When designing on the fly, it’s generally best to start from the middle, and work one’s way outward from there. Also, the cuirass and cuisses would be simplest to create, requiring no more than an approximate fit. All the jointing and lapped plating would come later. I held a hand above my etherium sled, and its dorsal surface began to ripple and bulge as I drew forth the metal for my first pieces of armor.
Doc said, “Eugh. What’s that smell?”
I ignored him. The rim of the Netherglass was some three miles away and downwind. Though zombies are rightfully notorious for their odor, I strongly doubted we could smell them from here.
Roughly five pounds of etherium poured upward toward my hand, pulling free from the sled in an inverted teardrop. Using both of my hands to aid in the focusing of my will, I softened the metal and spun it like dough for flatbread to form it into a disk of uniform thickness… and I smelled the odor Doc had been talking about. It wasn’t zombies.
It was blood.
The smell is unmistakable, but considerable blood must be spilled before the scent is obvious to an ordinary human nose, especially outdoors. And this odor was accompanied by a distinct undernote of sulfur, as well as a hint of the proteinaceous soot that arises from charred meat.
I had a thought that Baltrice might, conceivably, be cooking something on her sled behind me… but an animal she had freshly killed? In the middle of the Glass Desert? It was so improbable that I paused a moment, struck by an overpowering conviction that I had done this before. And that what came next would be bad.
“Just like deja vu all over again, isn’t it?”
I froze. If I live a thousand years, I will never mistake that voice, the blend of upsloper condescension and petulantly malignant mockery.
The etherium dropped into my hand, and I left it there. “Renn.”
“This is the part where you turn and attack, Tezzeret.” He sounded like he was looking forward to it. “Come on, don’t be shy.”
“Or turn and run,” Doc buzzed in my left ear.
I told both of them, “No.”
“You will, you know,” Renn said. “And soon. For all the good it’ll do you.”
“I didn’t come here to fight.”
“Oh, it won’t be a fight, Tezzeret. You attack, then take a nap. Hardly qualifies as combat.”
“Are you sure he’s wrong?” Doc said nervously.
“Nobody needs to get hurt,” I said.
Renn snorted a contemptuous chuckle. “That pyromancer of yours didn’t agree,” he said. “Kind of a hothead, isn’t she?”
In his mind, that had probably sounded funny. “Where is she? Is she alive?”
“Guess.”
“Renn-”
“You can try to beat it out of me.”
“Some other time.”
“He took out Baltrice?” Doc sounded appalled. “Just now? While we were standing here?”
“No,” I murmured. “He’s going to take her out after I leave. He won’t even get here until we’re in the middle of the zombies.”
“Then how can-why is he-I mean, what?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Oh, really?”
“The armor was a great idea,” Renn said conversationally. “I’ve always admired your ingenuity. You’ll never know how many times you beat me. I should say, time lines where you beat me.”
Doc said, “Something tells me this isn’t one of those time lines.”
“Shh.”
“Finally, I just got aggravated enough with losing that I decided we should have our chat before you make any. This way, we skip the whole fight and get straight to the part where I torture you. A lot.”
Finally I turned. Renn leaned casually on Baltrice’s gravity sled, its etherium dulled by a thick coating of fresh-looking blood. The area around it was drenched until the powdered glass was wholly black. The scent of charred meat rose from his clothing-but it wasn’t his flesh that had burned.
“You don’t have to torture me, and you have no reason to harm Baltrice,” I said.
Renn snorted. “I don’t have to eat,” he said, gesturing with his etherium arms to his etherium chest, in which the sole remaining organ was his etherium heart. “But I eat anyway.”
“I’ll tell you what you need,” I said.
“Oh, don’t do that.”
“It’s why I came here. Specifically. To share what I know.”
“You always were tiresome,” Renn said. He pushed himself off the gravity sled, to stand balanced on the sand. His personal shields crackled and spit as they disintegrated the powdered glass on the wind. “Listen to me, Tezzeret. You’ve already told me everything you know. I’ve been torturing you for several days-recreational torture, really. Just for fun. To pass the time. I’ll get so bored after I torture Baltrice to death. You told me everything before I even touched her.”
“Does he know he’s not actually making sense?” Doc whispered.
“He is making sense,” I muttered, “just not to us. Get ready.”
“For what?”
“Then why are you here, Renn?” I spread my hands. “You know everything I know-why talk to me at all?”
“I don’t know everything,” he said, walking toward me. The golden haze of his shields intensified, and blazing white mana gathered itself around his fists. “I’m still trying to figure out how you escaped.”
“Did I? Well, well.”
“It’s not even possible,” he said. “I have you restrained by a mana siphon and shackles made out of these sleds, so you can’t use any magic at all, and I have you in a hundred thousand-to-one hypertemporal field. So I can watch you age. And then I blink… and you’re gone.”
“Interesting.”
“I thought so,” he said, and lashed out with both hands. Blinding white energy erased the sun and the sky and the sand and everything in the universe except for Renn himself. It caught me and held me in its unbreakable grip, turning my own mana reserve against me, so that the harder I struggled, the stronger it became. “Tell me how you escape, and I’ll let you live long enough to try it again.”
“I have a better idea,” I said through my teeth, clenched hard enough to chip by the power of Renn’s binding. Focusing my will in a specific way-not unlike imagining a musical passage so vividly that I could change which mental instruments played it-did not require mana. “I’ll tell you when I see you again… about, hmmm, let’s say, twenty minutes from now.”
Renn tightened his magical grip until I could no longer breathe. “Really? And where you will be in the meantime?”
I could not speak to reply. Instead, I winked at him.
His sneer of triumph coagulated into a frown of uncertain disbelief that warmed me to the centers of my bones. Then I uncoiled the focusing of my will, exactly as I would have if I’d had command of my own mana… exactly as I would have if I were trying to planeswalk.
There followed an exceptionally gratifying blam, which erased Renn and the desert and the gravity sleds, to dump me gasping on the floor of a large, dimly lit cavern lined with glowing red crystals, which smelled strongly of dragon.
“Y’know,” Doc said peevishly, “you could have just asked…”
TEZZERET
I shoved myself up to my knees, but my heaving chest and trembling legs wouldn’t let me rise the rest of the way.
“You think we could have cut that a little closer?” Doc said. “Not like we were in a hurry or anything.”
“Doc, please.” I squeezed my eyes shut and set my hands upon my temples, trying to squeeze the whirl in my mind down to a manageable torrent. “If we weren’t in a hurry then, we certainly are now.”
“In a hurry to do what? Take a nap while we wait for Bolas?”
“Screw Bolas.”
“You first.”
I’d brought no actual tools into the Glass Desert, but the fabric of my tunic and breeches could be cut and braided into a variety of useful types of rope, and the leather of my boots could be useful for strapping. But best of all were the steel of the toe caps and the strap that stiffened the sole, not to mention the grommets. As soon as I thought of this, however, I realized my feet were cold. Worse, I could feel the texture of the sangrite crystals with my toes.